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Humpback Whales Yield Some Sonic Secrets to Science

By Andrew C. Revkin March 20, 2012 12:39 pmMarch 20, 2012 12:39 pm

OAR/National Undersea Research ProgramA female humpback whale and its calf.

David Rothenberg, a musician and environmental philosopher, is a fairly frequent voice on this blog when the subject is animal sounds and behavior. His latest book, “Survival of the Beautiful,” is on aesthetics and evolution. You may have caught his recent “jam” with emerging cicadas. Rothenberg, who wrote the widely discussed book on whale communication, “Thousand Mile Song,” reflects below on some recent research focused on the remarkably variable songs of humpback whales. Here’s his “Your Dot” contribution on the evolving music of humpbacks:

This has been a great time for humpback whale song studies, with two major papers out in the last 12 months. You might think that every year should be a big year for studying the song of the humpback whale, which is one of the longest, most complex, and most beautiful examples of animal communication that we humans have tried, and mostly failed, to decipher. One reason we can’t is that these whales live in a world completely different from ours, entirely under water. And when we listen to their songs, among other challenges it can be very difficult to detect where they are coming from, since sound seems to come from everywhere all at once when recorded in the sea.

One thing we have known for some decades now is that humpback whales are constantly altering their songs, changing them from week to week, month to month, year to year. We don’t know why they do this. All we know is that only the male whales are singing, and that all the males in a given group tend to sing the identical tune. They change their song as a group, each ocean’s population sings a consistent song, and in neighboring oceans, you’ll here a different song. These songs go on for about 20 minutes before repeating, and one song cycle can last up to 24 hours.

Only the males are singing during mating and breeding season in the tropics, so we kind of assume it’s to attract the attention of females. However, in 40 years of scientists studying this phenomenon, no human has ever seen a female whale show any visible interest in this exclusively male musical activity. Does that mean it’s more like thrash metal than a love song – perhaps some form of cetacean male bonding? At least one group of scientists has claimed exactly that.

The mainstream scientific view about humpback whale song is that it’s all a kind of pop music evolutionary strategy; that the whales all like the same hit song, but it has to be a continually changing new “hit.” Just like humans listening to Top 40 radio, quickly getting bored with the latest chart topper and always craving the next variant.

One puzzle is that these South Pacific whales seem to be changing their tunes more rapidly than those in other oceans. Why? Are they the planet’s true hipster whales, not content with the status quo? Did a few whales from the Indian Ocean sneak past New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and bring exotic new beats with them? We can only keep listening to find out.

Meanwhile, something else has been observed in the Indian Ocean. Humpbacks around Madagascar, the huge island of the coast of East Africa, sing songs mostly quite distinct from those across the ocean, off the shores of West Australia. Why don’t they share more song types, like the whales off Hawaii and Baja — thousands of miles apart — that seem to sing the same Pacific Ocean songs?

There is only one theme that the whales on the opposite sides of the Indian Ocean share. Why only one? Sorry to say, but as usual with humpback whales, scientists do not know. But a study by Anita Murray, Sal Cerchio, and a large international research team published earlier this year in Marine Mammal Science documents this fact, and it is one more step toward demonstrating that this one species of whale, the great humpback, behaves quite differently in different parts of the world. [Related video and audio can be found here.]

They learn this behavior through their social living, singing, and listening, and thus can be said to possess a form of culture. We are not the only animals on this planet with a constantly changing hit parade.

How can we understand this phenomenon better? Being a musician, I’ve always thought we should jam with the whales, interact with them to make a new kind of music together. Will that cause a shock to whale musical culture, like when African music changed America by bringing in the blues? Only time and better ears will tell.

For more on this subject, read Rothenberg’s 2007 Times Op-Ed article “Speak Whale to Me.” You can watch and hear Rothenberg and some friends create whale-inspired music in the video below:

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.